Oh. My. God.
Awesome video, but what an atrocious practice to string a stick. Very manual, highly inconsistent tensioning, using sharp-edge pliers to grab the mains.....shoving in an awl to crush the string against the wood....Yikes!!! And this was all with natural gut?!?!?!?!
Awesome video though, that guy's seen some sh*t in his life I'm sure.

I used to string my badmington rackets freehanded with darts and a wooden round block back in the 90’s. Trouble was, having no rack to keep the frame from bending round while doing the mains. Had to start the crosses from the bottom to push it back into the egg shape, it was designed for. Without a rack I had to tighten each line separately.

Broke lot of strings playing, so I figured to do the stringing myself, instead of having the rackets left over a stringer every week or two. You get really good sense of how tight you need to twist the block for consistent tension. Not ofcourse as precise as modern machines, but close enough. The tension would settle overnight and the rackets were ready for play next morning.

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On pain meds - all contributed matter and anti-matter subject to disclaimer

It does sound nice and tight when he finishes. I love him showing how they would replace a broken string instead of restringing everything. Different times when people did not throw money away so freely. A friend of mine told me they always replaced broken strings that same way. I had no idea what tension my strings had when I first started playing and it never effected my game. You would grab your wood racket and play without blaming the racket or the strings.

What a marvelous video! A very nice piece of tennis history (and just loved that he added the trebling!). I would so love to string an antique racquet on that machine with those tools. Heck, I'd just love to have the machine for display (I think I'd stick one of my vintage Dreadnought Drivers on it). To the OP, thank so much for sharing this wonderful time capsule.

P.S.: If anyone under 15 wonders whether you could add a Wise to this machine, the answer is yes.

Thank you, it was so insightful to see watch him do this. Do you think this repair method would work for strings nowadays? I imagine not with the tensions that we see and how forceful the ball can be struck.

Thank you, it was so insightful to see watch him do this. Do you think this repair method would work for strings nowadays? I imagine not with the tensions that we see and how forceful the ball can be struck.

Click to expand...

The grommets would not work as a hole in wood. You’d need a knot between the holes on plastic grommet.

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On pain meds - all contributed matter and anti-matter subject to disclaimer